MUSIC

“‘Selten Gehörte Musik' [rarely heard music] developed from our ‘artists' workshops' in which an intimate circle of friends met together at loose intervals to talk, eat, drink and collaborate on artistic projects. the aim of the workshops was to create a fruitful intensity over a period of several days {and nights) which, without being restricted to any one field of the arts, fostered creative production of a totally pleasure-oriented kind. (…) During a subsequent visit of Dieter Roth to Berlin, the desire for a joint musical event was kindled (…) There followed an uninterrupted two-day session which spawned the record 3 Berliner Dichterworkshop [3rd Poetry Wworkshop, Berlin] (12./13. 7. 1973) / Roth, Rühm, Wiener, for which we invented the ‘brand name' Selten Gehoerte Musik. (…) In 1974 we decided it was no longer enough to produce our ‘rarely heard music' simply in order to document it on a record, we had to combine the recording with a public performance. (…) We accepted an invitation to perform in Munich in May 1974, this time with five of us: Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener.” Gerhard Rühm, Some data on ‘Selten Gehörte Musik'

First ever reissue of those legendary recordings from 1961! Edition of 600 copies, double CD in 6-panel digipak in slipcase, with 12-page illustrated booklet and linernotes by Asger Jorn in french & english. "Musique Phénomenale" was recorded by Asger Jorn & Jean Dubuffet between December 1960 and March 1961 in Paris, and first published in 1961 as a box containing four 10" records in an edition of 50 copies (+ 6 copies H.C.) by Galleria del Cavallino, Venice. 61 years after it's original release this first ever reissue was produced in an edition of 600 copies by Daniel Löwenbrück / Edition Hans Pumpestok, København, in cooperation with Fondation Dubuffet, Paris.

CD version limited to 270 copies, six panel digipack** Recording of the premiere performance of Nitsch’s latest large scale symphony for full orchestra, brass ensemble and choir, in five movements. Composed for the 155th Action of the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater, and performed at the nitsch museum, Mistelbach, September 9th, 2018. Directed by Andrea Cusumano. "The 155th action in Herman Nitsch's Das Orgien Mysterien Theater took place on September 1, 2018. As the first action to be staged in the Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach, Vienna, it coincided with the occasion of his 80th birthday. A series of processions both viscerally affecting and poignant in their restraint took place in the museum to a very crowded audience. This action was accompanied by a new symphony composed by Nitsch for large orchestra, brass band, and choir. Sudden and explosive motifs for the brass band punctuate still, though unnerving, drone-like passages that modulate over the course of the two-hour performance. Throughout, the movement of the participants in the action and the audience is accentuated by the incongruous percussive ring of the whistle that calls attention and directs the activity, heightening the intensity of the entire work.“ (Patrick Quick)

76 minutes collection of recordings made at the Friedrichshof commune between 1982 and 1990. Performed by Otto Muehl and members of the commune. Includes actionist group-music, improvised conceptual pieces, and barpianist-songs. Artist co-founder of the Viennese Actionism (with Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler), controversial founder of the sulphurous utopian community of Friedrichshof in 1972 (which will earn him seven years in prison in the 1990s), Otto Muehl (born 1925 in Grodnau, Austria, died 2013 in Moncarapacho, Olhão, Portugal) staged a series of "material actions" from 1963 to 1970, for film and photography, in which the body becomes part of the environment. Since then, he has developed his work as an enterprise of "surpassing pictorial painting by representing the process of its destruction", with the idea that the body is also an "object" to be shaped, the living body, as well as the social body, art and life being inseparable.

West Mineral return with a followup to Mister Water Wet’s 2019's subtropical ambient slow-burn debut ‘Bought the Farm’, expanding Iggy Romeu's horizons to contrast feverish Afro-Caribbean ambient jazz with jaunty illbient and atmospheric freakouts. Low-lit heat that’s highly recommended if yr into Nick León, Carlos Niño, Kelman Duran, Gonçalo F. Cardoso. Mister Water Wet continues to excavate the tropical soundscapes that simmer the producer's Kansas City home with his Puerto Rican roots, on a new album of extended vignettes and mood pieces that cross a late 90’s Mo Wax instrumentals vibe with present day feelings of displacement and ennui. LP opener ‘Bory’ tunes us into Water Wet’s weirdly fuzzed frequencies, where tremeloed strings and found sounds resemble what might have been a lost dean blunt x dean hurley sound design concept for Inland Empire, while ‘I Saw the Green Flash' opens a swirl of strings and traditional rhythms caught in a reflecting pool of canned classical orchestrals and 1950s theremin wails. 'Good Apple’, meanwhile, cranks up the mood with aged x looped piano paired with an undulating, bass-heavy shuffle that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelman Duran x Martin Denny mixtape. 'When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground' leans into heady jazz vapours, spreading crackle over pitch-fucked horn samples, but it’s the producer's weird use of percussion that keeps us gripped: scattering his arrangements across the grid, mimicking an ensemble of players deployed in irregular formations. Romeu embraces trip-hop on 'Any Other Time', blending Afro-Caribbean percussion with a swung downtempo beat, while ‘Isthmus’ reminds us of the clatterbox plunder of Moonshake’s PJ Harvey hookup ‘Just a Working Girl’ - with all its asymmetric hooks. The extended closing track 'Losing Blood' takes a leaf out of Fennesz's glitched rulebook, stretching and folding disintegrating loops through an 11 minute descent into the elegiac aether.

A seminal figure in the history of 20th century avant-garde, yet sinfully overlooked, Wolf Vostell unleashed ideas - those running wild through his debut LP "Dé-coll/age Musik", which remain a slap to the face, more than half a century after they were set into play. A founding member of Fluxus, an early instigator of Happenings, an innovator of video art, Vostell was equally one of the most radical and irreverent practitioners in sound that the world has ever known.

First released in 1982, "Dé-coll/age Musik" draws from material dating between the late 1950’s and early 80’s - the results of Vostell’s application of décollage, the near perfect inversion of collage. Rather than gathered and assembled sounds - as with Musique Concrète, these are the result of subtractions from a former whole - the death of one, giving life to the next.

Swelling from the past, Vostell’s efforts pull the rug from beneath the common history of structured sound. A singular body with no loyalty, producing shocking results. A grinding confrontation - an intoxicating immersion in sound - as brutal as it is ecstatic - an exercise in joy. "Dé-coll/age Musik" assembles the essence of a creative spirit which is rarely known. Each work as radical and fresh today as the moment it was made.

Prescient jazz-techno mutator Jamie Hodge (Conjoint, Studio Pankow) ushers a long overdue solo debut album, of sorts, with Demdike Stare’s DDS label; an archival harvest spanning his earliest experiments circa his Plus 8 debut thru to ’00s anomalies - hybrid ambient techno jazz and incredibly inventive forerunners of dubbed electronica - bookended by two Demdike Stare edits. Essential listening if yr into anything on the axis from Move D to Detroit Escalator Company, Jan Jelinek or Tortoise. Jamie Hodge grew up in Chicago in a jazz-loving family, first forming a band when he was a teenager, using drum machines and keyboards to rattle thru covers of Joy Division and Ministry tracks. His sound progressed into dubbier spaces when he befriended Ted Gray, a local record store clerk, and into off-kilter jazz when he ran into Bundy K. Brown and David Grubbs, who let Hodge watch rehearsals of the first Gastr del Sol recordings. But the transformational moment came when a friend (pictured on the "Diagonals" cover no less) played Hodge the 1991-released "From Our Minds To Yours Vol. 1", the first compilation on Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva's Plus 8 label. From here, Hodge took his growing obsession with dance music to early Chicago raves, and began to explore European techno and UK hardcore. Eventually he met Hawtin in person after convincing his mom to cut through Canada on the way back from visiting East Coast colleges, and released his Plus 8 debut by the time he'd moved into a college dorm in 1993, using the Born Under A Rhyming Planet moniker for the first time. Hodge was also immersed in Chicago’s famous experimental jazz scene of the ‘90s - later on establishing the short-lived but excellent Aestuarium label that brought the work of Philip Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble to wider attention. Hodge would release two more 12"s for Plus 8, heading to Germany to connect with David Moufang (Move D) and forming Conjoint, later Studio Pankow. The material presented on "Diagonals" takes us right back to Hodge's vintage era, when he was using a mutating spread of equipment - Korg MS-20, Atari ST, Nord Micro Modular, ARP Axxe, Yamaha TG77 and TX816, and Alesis HR-16B - to assemble tracks that reached through his wide range of musical interests. According to Hodge, more Plus 8 releases were planned but never materialised, so this long overdue set fills in the gaps between records like 2000's classic Conjoint plate "Earprints" and Studio Pankow's still-underrated 2005 slow-burner "Linienbusse”. ‘Diagonals’ sputters to life with a Demdike Stare edit of a track Hodge recorded in Brooklyn while he was on summer break from college and working at a local record distributor. Inspired by music he'd seen at that year's New Music Seminar, he used an Atari ST and Yamaha TG77, a glassy FM module, to conduct a mood that hovers between '80s new age DIY tapes and gaseous dub techno. ‘Handley' digs into the tranquil electrified jazz modalities over a swung drum machine rhythm, squeezing robotic soul from a modest arsenal of gear, lashing the hypermelodic post-Detroit sensitivity of The Black Dog/Plaid to Chicago-axis experiments from Tortoise and Gastr del Sol. The shorter interludes are just as engrossing: Hodge experiments FM spray on 'Trampoline' and dusty Jan Jelinek-esque electroid funk on 'Menthol', ducking further into jazz on 'Hot Nachos...', augmenting his electronics with fretless electric bass. Cherry-picked by DDS, the selection best portrays the mix of soulful depth and atmospheric effervescence that defined that elusive era in electronic music; spanning a late night spectrum of styles from dusty electro-acoustic ambient prisms to supple deep house pearls, with a special strain of gently frayed computer jazz touching on the outer limits of Detroit techno. It's exceptional material that reminds us of a time when electronic music was frothing over with hope, futurism and revolutionary spirit, so whether you're into the post-Artificial Intelligence era or the Jazz-looped investigations of Jan Jelinek and crew, "Diagonals" feels like stepping into a particularly good dream.

Muir and Caminiti are sick and tired of ambient music's bizarre entanglement with the wellness industrial complex. You know what we're on about here: healing sounds and soothing balms for well-heeled adult babies to jam on Instagram, supported by their aesthetic collection of verdant succulants (modular synth not essential, but preferred). And yeh we fully realize that the world's going to shit, but we're also pretty sure that a guided meditation isn't gonna lead us to salvation, especially when it's accompanied by music that's at best a poor approximation of private press biz that came out four decades ago. Growing up in California, Muir and Caminiti quickly developed a deep suspicion of this kinda snake oil peddling and on "Talisman" fabricate a charm to ward off fakers - a subtly fanged ambient-not-ambient dedication to desert doom, mountain jazz and lysergic experimental forms. The duo split the labor cleanly: seasoned improviser Caminiti handles electric guitar, and Muir works as a sonic alchemist, grinding Caminiti's takes into dust and subliming each note into a thick, vaporous haze. Anyone who's heard either artist's work before will have an idea of where to start, and there are traces of Caminiti's blasted earth recordings as part of Barn Owl, as well as his cinematic solo productions; Muir meanwhile picks up where last year's Ilian Tape-released "Mana" left off, orchestrating a mood that's bleak but not suffocating, and dark but not without cracks of light. The most obvious stylistic comparisons are to Seattle doom metal originators Earth - particularly 2005's country-fried "Hex" - and Norwegian maestro Terje Rydpal, who drove prog, jazz and psychedelic music into new territory in the 1970s and 1980s. Caminiti takes these touchstones and exposes them to the harsh Los Angeles sunlight, further drying out Earth's Pacific Northwestern blues and adding some neon flicker to Rydpal's icy, mountainous naturalism. He also admits he was soaking up pedal steel music at the time, and you can hear the trace of artists like Chas Smith, Daniel Lanois and BJ Cole in his recumbent riffs. A trained sound engineer who's spent the last few years refining his skills in Berlin, Muir looks to the GRM school for his direction, and employs subtle electronic processes, occasionally augmenting them with his own field recordings. This isn't just arbitrary birdsong to blithely suggest the natural world over billowing major chords, but evocative audio snapshots of the burning Californian landscape. It's these small touches that ground "Talisman" and provide it with a brawny narrative backdrop - the duo have created a record that's devotional and melodic, but one that never resorts to cheap tricks or well-worn manipulation. They've instead landed on a sound that's antagonistic but not annoyingly confrontational (we see you power ambient) or exhaustingly conceptual. Diving into one track or another is almost pointless, Muir and Caminiti assembled "Talisman" to be played in a single sitting - it's a mood piece that's unwrenchable from its essential whole. Listening is a chance to escape into another universe for a while, one that takes rough and rugged elements (Muir and Caminiti bonded over their love of contemporary death metal bands like Spectral Voice and Blood Incantation) and refines them into lavish sigils that suggest the confusing unpredictability of our era. Anti-ambient? Maybe.

In 1997 and 1998, the late great Japanese composer, producer, and DJ Susumu Yokota released two of the most eclectic albums of his decades-long career, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace. Recorded under his Stevia alias for Tokyo Techno pioneer DJ Miku’s Newstage Records/NS-COM, they were Yokota-san’s homage to the foundational days of club music in Japan. This year, Glossy Mistakes are proud to present the first official vinyl editions of Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, originally released on CD during the golden days of the format. Packaged in reimagined cover artwork created by the celebrated Japanese visual artist Masaho Anotani, these two albums perfectly capture the diversity at the heart of Yokota-san’s oeuvre. Across Fruits of The Room, he takes us on an expansive odyssey through his personal visions for deep house, street soul, jungle/drum & bass, digital dub and the slipstream moments between genres. A totally inspired dancefloor exploration. When Yokota-san wrote and produced the music on Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace in 1997, he was reflecting on the broader culture that surrounded dance music in Japan in the early to mid-nineties. It was an era when the psychedelic culture of late sixties America, the afterglow of UK acid house/rave, the new age movement and cyberpunk dovetailed together. Within DJ Miku and Yokota-san’s social circles, the thinking of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs electrified the air. By 1996, the moment, brilliant and blinding as it was, was over. “We all felt that the rave scene fizzled out,” DJ Miku says. As he puts it, there was a collective feeling around him that it had all become too much. From the calm that followed, DJ Miku, Yokota-san and their open-eared peers made the decision to switch tracks and start from scratch. DJ Miku believes that with his Stevia releases, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, Yokota-san wanted to express the sweet and sour nature of the passing of those wild early days and his wish for true peace. “At the time, we saw eye-to-eye, with an implicit understanding of each other,” he explains. “Even now, twenty-five years later, I am confident it was like that.”

Influenced by the minimal music of the 60s and 70s, baroque music, and experimentation in studio environments, Canadian artist Sarah Davachi creates music using a variety of sounds including analog synthesizers, piano, electronic organ, pipe/reed organ, vocals, tape samplers, and orchestral music. Sarah Davachi, a Canadian artist who creates music with a variety of sounds, including piano, electronic organ, pipe/lead organ, vocals, tape sampler, and orchestral music, has released her latest album "Two Sisters" on her Late Music label. The album features a chamber ensemble and a pipe organ solo. A variety of instruments are used, including carillon (a keyboard instrument composed of very large cast-iron bells), chorus, string quartet, bass woodwinds, trombone quartet, and sine tones and electronic drones. The pipe organ is a 1742 Italian tracker organ, now located in the deserts of the American Southwest, and contains the sounds of a very rare pipe organ.

DEVIL’S NIGHTMARE (La terrificante notte del demonio) 1971 by ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI, considered one of the most evocative and suggestive horror soundtracks, marked his debut release on LP, from original master tapes, in 2017 thanks to Cinedelic records, and in a few days it was sold out. It is now repressed in 300 copies. Don't miss it!

First new album in nine years by a musical visionary and hugely influential figure in new music. Forty years since its creation, Jon Hassell's Fourth World aesthetic remains a powerful influence on modern electronic music. Continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing, fragments of performance are sampled, looped, overdubbed and re-arranged into beguiling unexpected shapes. Hassell applies the painterly technique of ‘pentimento’ to the arrangements, teasing out texture by the overlaying of sound upon sound, or a carefully timed reveal of the delicate bones pinning the frame of a track together.

The release of this new album also sees the launch of Jon’s own label, Ndeya (pronounced “in-day-ya”), which will be a home for new work as well as well as selected archival releases, including re-presses of classic sides and some astonishing unreleased music.

Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced “a pause for the cause”, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet. Sometimes the tracklists would note “ad break” or “ads”, helping to narrow the search. But often I’d just stumble on a bunch in the middle of a pirate show preserved on YouTube or an oldskool blog. A few of my original unintended “saves” and latterday “finds” are included in this wonderful collection by audio archaeologist Luke Owen. It’s the latest in his series of compilations of UK pirate radio advertisements, with this volume focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising “clean toilets” and “tight but polite security” (“sensible security” is another variation). Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. (Most rave ads incorporate snippets of current music, of course – big anthems and obscure “mystery tracks” alike). Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: who were Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie? Putting on my serious hat for a moment, I think these ads are valuable deposits of sociocultural data, capturing the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy in which promoters, deejays and MCs competed for a larger slice of the dancing audience. But mostly, they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music’s forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era. — Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture.

Back in the early ‘90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced “a pause for the cause”, I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That’s something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet. Sometimes the tracklists would note “ad break” or “ads”, helping to narrow the search. But often I’d just stumble on a bunch in the middle of a pirate show preserved on YouTube or an oldskool blog. A few of my original unintended “saves” and latterday “finds” are included in this wonderful collection by audio archaeologist Luke Owen. It’s the latest in his series of compilations of UK pirate radio advertisements, with this volume focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising “clean toilets” and “tight but polite security” (“sensible security” is another variation). Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. (Most rave ads incorporate snippets of current music, of course – big anthems and obscure “mystery tracks” alike). Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: who were Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie? Putting on my serious hat for a moment, I think these ads are valuable deposits of sociocultural data, capturing the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy in which promoters, deejays and MCs competed for a larger slice of the dancing audience. But mostly, they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music’s forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era. — Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture.

Reticulated bassbin minimalism from NYC’s K Wata, runner of the pivotal clubnight, Slink, and now producer of note with a mutant style comparable to Batu or Mosca Daring to differ in a field of unapologetic copycats, K Wata makes a strong impression with his debut haul of skeletal rhythmic tics and aerated textures that feel like a ghostly distillation of current UK mutations. Feeling out murky negative space with brittle 2-step bones in ‘Meet me at the One’, he proceeds to dial up the atmospheric content around the displaced steppers footing of ‘2 Spot Text’, and proper gyring sound design in the superb centrepiece ‘Lost My Focus’. At its most supple, ‘Dot Dot Dot’ toys with delicate 2-step patterns in subtly warped hyperspace, and ‘Sling of Life’ reduces his style to pure plasmic textures and whispered murmurs that could make for a crafty bridge in DJ sets.

The latest offering from 12th Isle collects a variety of recordings from Vasily Stepanov and Vlad Dobrovolski as part of their on-going S A D project (Udacha/Muscut). As part of their process, S A D sample and distort old de-magnetised tapes, constantly adding to and reworking their own sound-world. Layers of kosmiche synthesisers, off-kilter woodblock percussion and lysergic field recordings interplay with dense ambient textures in a true collage-style approach to music making. Across the nine tracks, multiple collaborations and aliases coalesce to present a thorough look at both artists approach to communicating the world around them. Drawing influence from nature and the outdoor concerts of Vladislav’s band Kurvenschreiber as well as late night free jazz shows and a similar ‘hauntological’ approach seen in Dobrovolski’s recent ‘Playbacks for Dreaming’, the pair express a unique genre-traversing attitude. More from the 12th Isle due very soon!

Saltern’s latest offering marks the first-ever release of “lost minimalist” Terry Jennings’ visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a close associate of Young, Terry Riley, and Dennis Johnson, and an early adopter of minimalist tendencies, creating slow, sustained music, influenced by jazz, modalism, and late romantic classical music. Jennings died tragically in his early forties, most of his work lost to a chaotic life; however, his forward-looking music quietly exerted a lasting influence on composers including Young and Harold Budd. Composed over sixty years ago, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, foreshadows a number of movements in postwar avant-garde music. Despite the title, there is no saxophone on this album. At over eighty minutes, La Monte Young’s justly tuned realization of Piece for Cello and Saxophone for cello alone unifies and extrapolates Terry Jennings’ dense harmonies, creating an extended field of complex sonorities in motion, all brought to life by the immaculate playing of Charles Curtis. The recording captures Curtis in a performance from 2016 reflecting more than twenty-five years of dedication to the piece.

Already sold out at the distributor. Einstürzende Neubauten, pioneers of German industrial music and unconventional in every way, defined their challenging and creative career by using junk metal, saws, tin drums, drills, hammers and many other unexpected instruments. A masterpiece from 1981! A legendary act that is not only one of the founding fathers of industrial music, but also one of the most highly influential in the sharp musical world where avant-garde music and rock intersect. A cathartic cascade of noise. A true masterpiece that remains a radical and extreme artistic statement even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 12-page booklet included.

It was created for the "FORESTRO SUMMIT" event space held at Forest Limit in Hatagaya, Tokyo in January 011. The sound was selected from natural environmental soundscapes, sound effects, low frequency, electronic music, and experimental music. It is a 70-minute mix including silent time, which is connected to "SOMETHING IN THE AIR" in 2012, which I personally started to experiment with during this period. I tried to create a "sound prescription" worldview that is not ambient, experimental, new age, or healing, but rather a guide to the air and space, a "sound prescription" that you can listen to and feel with your free senses and imagination, while stimulating your perception to a good degree. It is a record of the first phase of the mind-drawing challenge to explore the space between music, song selection and mix arrangement. Ten years after the recording, we felt that the appeal of this mix could be better conveyed by listening to it on cassette tape. Compuma

Red/White two-color body cassette.
Limited edition of 200 copies.
All profits from this release will be donated to Ukrainian volunteer groups UAnimals and Save Pets Of Ukraine.

Artificial Dance founder Interstellar Funk releases Live At The Rest Is Noise - Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Limited to 150 cassettes, the recording documents Interstellar Funk’s performance at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw concert hall in October 2021. The 45-minute set ebbs and pulses, leaving behind Interstellar Funk’s penchant for hard-wearing club sounds in favour of melody and texture. Some passages mirror elements from the studio album Into The Echo (Dekmantel, 2022), but the live setting allows Interstellar Funk to expand and explore richly detailed sonic spaces that highlight his skills as a composer-performer. Download card included.

Hajj’s Paris-based Dawn label delivers Modern Collapse’s debut album of dembow, drill and D&B tinted witch house-gothic. Leading down their unmarked path from Ronce’s frightening ‘Aquatics’ comp and the ‘From Dawn Till Dusk’ set that introduced us to Modern Collapse in 2021, ‘Usual Case Scenario’ serves to grasp the full scope of Gabriel De Sercey & Hugo Fabry’s slant on chthonic, contemporary club styles. To our ears they merge salient aspects of now-decade old witch house and ricocheting ballistics of ‘00s junglist breakcore with flourishes of ambient chamber classical and dembow that temper the emotions at the shadowy limen of club music’s sweatier peaks. The eight tracks are arranged with a underlying narrative thrust or arc that makes for an absorbing ride, bookending the session with particularly tender, cinematic parts of icy keys, vaporised vox and ambient subtlety, while the main body staggers between ruggedest UK-style dubstep (‘Gateway to Nihilism’), gothic chamber classical (‘Untold Subjects (Skit1))’, and scowling brukouts of dembow-rooted jungle/breakcore on ’Stolen Whispers in the Club’ and ‘Rush’.

Pow wow singer and Bon Iver collaborator Joe Rainey directs his astonishing voice thru industrial grit, widescreen orchestrals and chaotic DIY synth noise on "Niineta", his debut for Justin Vernon's 37d03d label. Completely singular music. Rainey was brought up in Minneapolis, with a heritage that links to the Red Lake Ojibwe - an indigenous tribe that has a sovereign state in northern Minnesota. And while he didn't grow up there, he long felt the pull of a culture that at various times has been blotted out by the USA. Rainey has been involved in pow wow singing since he was just five years old, and has performed in bands as well as building up an immense archive of field recordings. 'Niineta' is his debut album, but he's been performing for years - in 2016, he even brought Justin Vernon to tears during a festival show in Wisconsin. It was enough for Vernon to invite Rainey to contribute to his last album, and sign him to the 37d03d he runs with The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner. The record is an example of how pow wow traditions can be synthesized into different forms without losing their musical core; Rainey's range and vocal style roots the album in tradition, but his production and willingness to experiment fires "Niineta" into the future. With help from Fog's Andrew Broder, Rainey has put together a distorted, abstract backdrop that happily ducks from jagged beatscapes into luscious orchestral cinematics without any unintentional jerkiness. The music is consistent with Rainey's pow wow tradition, but acknowledges decades of music that too often has sat distant. 'b.e. son' loops vocal phrases across each other over blown-out percussion and sweeping strings, and 'easy on the cide' foregrounds a beat that sounds rougher than gravel, Autotuning Rainey's lead vocal and contorting it evocatively. On 'no chants', a frazzled TR-808 kick booms beneath tape saturated pulses, creating a soundscape that's not a million miles from Kanye West's game-changing "Yeezus" - but this isn't homage, Rainey uses the distortion to hint at darker elements, a disturbance in his culture that's violent, deafening and charged with emotion. The album's lengthy finale 'phil's offering' is also its most impressive, building slowly over looped crackle that gives a rhythmic click to Rainey's unforgettable vocal performance - eventually the track disappears into an industrial blur as processed field recordings reveal Rainey's heritage. Trust us, this ain't like anything you've heard before.

An album Maximum Rock 'N' Roll deemed not punk enough to review, Unwound’s 1994 sophomore effort was a lethal depth charge aimed at major label grunge and independent hardcore alike. From the off-kilter, vertiginous rhythm of “Entirely Different Matters” to the neck-snapping velocity of “What Was Wound” to the relentless pounding at the end of “All Souls Day,” New Plastic Ideas is the Sonic Youth loving older sister to Fake Train's post-punk-obsessed little brother.